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Dec. 23, 2022 - Sean Hannity Show
32:06
Twitter Files - December 22nd, Hour 3
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Hello, America.
Welcome back to the Sean Hannity Show.
This is Jeffrey Lord, sitting in for our friend Sean Hannity.
And we have a special guest on with us now.
We will be talking to journalist Michael Schellenberger.
And you may have seen him in the news because, as you know, he's one of the independent journalists who's been tapped by Elon Musk and I think in this case, Barry Weiss, to sift through round seven of the Twitter files.
And what Michael has uncovered is just stunning.
It's no joke.
I find it really chilling.
And as a result of what he's discovered, Michael is calling for Congress to probe revelations the FBI and the intelligence community work to discredit, quote unquote, the Hunter Biden laptop story that appeared in the New York Post ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
So without further ado, hello, Michael.
How are you?
Good.
Hey, thanks for having me.
You bet.
You bet.
So tell us a little bit about this, what you've discovered.
I mean, I think this is such a bizarre set of stories here, but it doesn't, I have to say, it doesn't surprise me in the least that stuff was going on.
What have you seen here as you've been going through this?
Well, if you, you know, what it appears to be, and I can't entirely prove, and that's partly why we need an investigation, but it appears to have been an organized influence campaign by the FBI and retired FBI officials, including the former chief counsel,
potentially the former deputy chief of staff at Twitter, trying to basically prime both news organizations and social media platforms, namely Twitter and Facebook, to view the Hunter Biden laptop as a product of Russian disinformation rather than for what it really was, which was something turned over by a whistleblower to the FBI in December 2019.
He was a computer repair store owner.
FBI had that laptop since December 2019.
And yet through all of 2020, the FBI and former FBI officials, both inside and outside of Twitter and we think also Facebook, were communicating that they should be on guard for a hack and leak operation where the Russians would supposedly hack into somebody's computer and then leak it, but it would be misinformation.
And we now know that that really influenced how Twitter and everybody else, the news media, and then ultimately the public, perceived the Hunter Biden laptop so that a lot of people, including myself, dismissed the laptop as real and were very suspicious of it when we should have taken its contents more seriously.
What are your thoughts?
I mean, we had those, what was it, 50 people from the intelligence community come out and say this was Russian disinformation.
How much of this do you think was genuinely they didn't understand?
And how much of it do you think was just deliberately designed to save Joe Biden?
I think I have to say, after looking at all of this, I would say like 100% is from wanting to protect Biden and they wanted to get rid of Trump.
I mean, these are characters who have been on the record as wanting to get rid of Trump for years.
Right.
I also, I didn't even mention that episode, by the way, in my, I wrote Twitter files part seven, and I didn't even get to that, which is, but when you look at all of these things together, there's clearly an influence campaign.
Now, somebody could say, well, it wasn't organized.
It was more, you know, tacit, but it was incredibly effective, incredibly, there was people working on the inside of Twitter, people outside of Twitter.
There were the national security, the retired national security executives who signed that letter.
And there was also very strange, an Aspen Institute workshop where they took the senior news executives and national security correspondents for the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and Twitter and Facebook, and they got them together for what they call a tabletop exercise, which is basically to do a scenario for how to, I mean, if I'm being honest, how to not cover or miscover the Hunter Biden laptop.
And they did that in September, so one month before the laptop came to the public's view.
Wow.
Wow.
That is incredible.
Well, one of the concerns, and I wrote this book called Swamp Wars, Donald Trump and the New American Populism versus the Old Order.
And one of the things, and I've worked in Washington for a long time for Congressman, Senator, President, that would be President Reagan, and then Jack Kemp is HUD when he was Secretary in the Bush administration.
You really do come away with the impression after all of that that there is a swamp here, that it's, as I've said earlier in the show, not unlike junior high school.
You've got the cool kids and you've got the not-so-cool kids, and the cool kids run the show.
And when you get to something like this, this is just, to me, incredibly dangerous.
If you've got this combination of big tech and big media withholding information, in essence, from the American, not in essence, in reality, from the American people, that is a real problem.
And that speaks exactly to why what you were doing and Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi are important here, because there have to be people who are willing to really investigate.
And wow, we're talking about a shortage of that.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's alarming the extent to which you can see people basically taking efforts to prevent the public from considering what the Biden family business has been.
I mean, this is, it's important for people to understand that there's literally tens of millions of dollars that's gone to Joe Biden's son, to Joe Biden's brother, from powerful foreign interests, including four Chinese individuals who are tied to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence.
So this is not a minor issue.
This is not, this is around countries that are direct geopolitical rivals paying money into the Biden family.
And maybe you think that that'll be okay or you're not worried about that.
But then why would there have been this huge cover-up of it that went on for so long and then a real misinformation campaign related to it?
It doesn't make any sense.
I think it raises really disturbing questions around both the role of the FBI.
I think the FBI needs to be cleaned out.
There needs to be a depoliticization of the FBI.
It's our most important law enforcement body.
And I also think it's an indictment of the news media.
They are these reporters that are basically doing the, they're acting as public relations staff for the national security state rather than playing the typical role of journalists, which is to be skeptical of power and inquiring of power and critical of it.
Yeah, I think you got it absolutely right here.
And this is a problem.
And I'm frankly, we were just talking with Congressman James Comer from Kentucky, who's going to be the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee.
And I think that this kind of thing is going to get some examination from him and from his committee as well.
It should.
I mean, I think this kind of mentality has dominated the January 6th committee.
The selection of the members, you know, they're all there, Republican or Democrat, because they can't stand Donald Trump.
And there's no defense allowed, no cross-examination, none of this.
I mean, when you think of the really fundamental American values that are being trashed, basically, and not followed.
How much, in a physical sense, how much of this Twitter stuff have you had to go through?
I mean, I have this image in my head of you and everybody else involved in this sitting up into the wee hours, you know, and looking at Twitter number 1705, et cetera.
How much of this was there, and how long did it take you to go through?
Yeah, I mean, it is an enormous amount of information.
And yeah, I definitely have been, until I published my piece, I just wasn't doing any, I wasn't returning any phone calls on any of the other things I work on because, you know, part of it is that there's thousands of documents that we've had to read through.
And it's like anything, you know, most of it is just the ordinary business work.
And so you're looking for the really critical moments.
And then, of course, I think it's well publicized that Twitter is struggling financially, that Elon overpaid for it, or at least overpaid for it according to its market value.
I think Twitter has a social public value that's much higher than its financial value.
But nonetheless, the people are getting us the documents, everyone's being pulled out from doing stuff to save the company to give us these documents.
So we're very grateful to them for whatever you think of, you know, Elon Musk.
He's done a real public service in making these documents available.
So we feel very blessed to have had it.
And honestly, I think that in my Twitter thread, I think there's plenty of information in that single Twitter files part seven to justify a serious congressional investigation and maybe a special prosecutor because the documents that we've revealed show the pattern quite clearly.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, as I said to another of our guests, knowing that I was going to be having a conversation over the course of the show today about the FBI, I went back and looked at a book about the FBI written by a guy named Ronald Kessler, who did an in-depth study of it.
And there you find what was sort of amusing to me since this was long ago, J. Edgar Hoover basically telling President Kennedy he's got an informant who says that he, President Kennedy, was married before Jackie.
Then he tells Robert Kennedy, who's not only the president's brother, but attorney general and therefore Hoover's boss, that he has information from an agent that he, Bobby Kennedy, was having an affair with a woman in El Paso.
And Robert Kennedy replied icily, he'd never been to El Paso.
And then he did the same thing with Richard Nixon.
We have information, sir, that you've been having an affair with a woman in China.
So, you know, as much as I admire the FBI and knew at least one agent who lived in my area of Pennsylvania and was a straight arrow, I mean, there's a history here of the FBI not being as good as it should be when it comes to these things.
And I just think this has gotten out of control, that this whole business of hating Donald Trump has really pulled the curtain back because I think it's about more than Donald Trump.
If you've got people in these positions thinking that they can do whatever they want and not get caught and manipulate the American media or big tech.
And not to mention if you've got people in big tech that are all too willing to be manipulated, this is a problem.
Yes.
Well, Michael.
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Well, no, I mean, these are, you know, I think the thing that gives me some hope, you may, you know, people, it went viral on Twitter the other day, the testimony of Frank Church in, I believe, 1974, 1975.
He was a member of Congress or maybe a senator who was involved in kind of cleaning up the intelligence agencies, which had been, had, had really, there had been an abuse of power.
I mean, those words kept ringing through my head as I've been working on this for the last couple of weeks of abuse of power.
And I think that, you know, these institutions, they periodically are corrupted.
I mean, I think our founding fathers were aware that this would happen.
And so you have basically a good system, but we need to clean up these agencies and root out the politicization of them and get some new oversight, some new mechanisms.
But basically, it's time.
I just think after a while, these institutions go bad.
And on the media, that's on the FBI side.
On the media side, the internet is changing everything.
The social media environment has opened up new voices so that Elon Musk is working.
People that he knows are independent are not at the traditional corporate media.
We're independent, but now the media has to kind of follow what we're writing on this.
I think people don't trust the corporate news media, the mainstream news media very much anymore.
And so I think that some of these reforms are going to occur thanks to technology as well.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right.
We live in a new world here, and we've all got to figure out how to adjust.
Michael, thank you.
We're running out of time here, so thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us.
And this story is not going away, so keep at it.
Thanks so much for having me.
You bet.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Thank you, Michael.
That was Michael Schellenberger, who just dropped the Twitter files number seven, which certainly deserves a much closer look at an investigation into the Biden family, China, and big tech.
My name is Jeffrey Lord, sitting in for Sean Hannity today.
Please follow me at RealJeffrey Lord and listen to my podcast wherever podcasts are found.
You can follow me at Truth Social and the Word of the Lord and my website, thejeffreylord.com.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Ham, and I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass, you're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen.
Hey there.
I'm Mary Catherine Ham.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass, you're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen.
This is Jeffrey Lord from The Word of the Lord with Jeffrey Lord and theJeffreyLord.com and the American Spectator and Newsmax TV and Newsbusters and the world.
Oh, wow.
We rounded it out.
Nice Steve in there, huh?
We just put it all in from the world.
So Linda and I will return shortly, and we're going to have an interesting discussion about President Biden and how he sort of does things and doesn't do them so well and whether they're sort of smart or not and whether he has a history.
And he does have a history.
And in one case of this, I personally can testify to it because it rhymes with agerism.
That's all right.
That's right.
So we will be back very, very shortly here and close out the night.
This is Jeffrey Lord for Sean Hannity.
And that number is 800-941-7326 or 800-941-Sean, if you want to do it that way.
This is Jeffrey Lord, and welcome back to the last half hour of the Sean Hannity Show.
We are a handful of days from Christmas.
You know, Linda, the one person, and I know you tried so hard to get him on the show, but it was Santa Claus.
And he, I mean, he just more or less blew us off and said he had this thing he had to do.
He was like, ho, ho, ho.
See you later.
Rudolph was acting up, and I guess there were some problems there.
So I think it was probably a good thing that we didn't, you know, have him on.
It's hard to find good help.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, with all those little elves and all this kind of thing.
I mean, it's just, it's just difficult.
So they unionized.
Man, it got weird.
Yes, it did.
It did.
Quickly.
And then you find out that it's not Will, what's his name?
Will Farrell, you know, that there are real elves out there.
I love Elf.
I love Jimmy Conga.
Rest His Soul.
And I love Will Farrell.
That movie is amazing.
I found out yesterday it is 20 years old and my heart hurt a little.
Oh, wow.
Is that right, Ethan?
20 years old.
So you saw it when you were five.
Clearly.
He's actually four and a half, but he's counting.
Oh, good.
All right.
Well, we're going to have a little discussion here about our president and some of the problems he's been having.
And, you know, just this minute, a story has popped up on Fox News.
And the headline is, Biden fumed, dropped F-bombs as border crisis intensified a new book claims.
And you just think, how did he get into this situation in the first place?
And it's been my observation, and I'm certainly not alone, that sadly, he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to solutions and various situations.
And that has gotten him in trouble before when he was running for president in 1987.
He was simultaneously chairing the Robert Bork hearings when I was a young White House aide to President Reagan and running for president at the same time.
And he was running against one of his opponents was Michael Dukakis, the then Democratic governor of Massachusetts, who finally wound up winning the nomination.
And Michael Dukakis put together a little split-screen deal that showed the British Labor Party leader of the day, Neil Kinnock, going on about his family from Wales and how they were Welsh coal miners and how did he get an education and his wife got an education and all this.
And, you know, why am I the King Kinnock?
Well, the Dukakis campaign discovered and videoed Joe Biden out on the campaign trail using exactly that story from Neil Kinnock, except he changed it to the Bidens and Scranton instead of Wales.
So they put together this clip, and then we got into a situation where Joe Biden's campaign was saying it was a mistake and he doesn't do this kind of thing.
And as it turns out, I had caught him plagiarizing.
And I notified the New York Times.
And the backstory on this.
I really, just to set it up for the audience, so Jeffrey and I were talking before we got on the air, and Jeff starts telling me this story.
And I'm like, you've got to tell it like this on the air.
Like it's just, it gives you the picture of how these things actually used to happen when people were telling the truth, as you did.
So when I was a kid, a 17-year-old teenager living in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I was going to finishing my last two years of high school there.
And I was a big fan of then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the late President Kennedy at that point, who was himself running for president in 1968 in the primaries against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.
And he had competition from Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy.
And quite sadly, he was in Los Angeles the night he won the California Democratic primary.
And he thanks everybody and says, you know, and now it's on to Chicago where the convention was going to be, and let's win there.
And he starts to turn, and somebody grabs him and says, Senator, come this way.
And they take him off the podium and back through the kitchen of the hotel.
And there on the top of a table was a young Palestinian guy named Sirhan Sirhan with a pistol, and he shoots and kills Robert Kennedy.
Senator Kennedy lasted for maybe 24 hours or something, but he passed away.
The nation was in shock.
It was just, it was awful.
And my good old Nixon-loving mother consented to getting on a bus with me from Allentown and went into New York and stood in line to go past the Kennedy casket in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
We stood in line for hours so that I could reach out and touch the flag on the casket and all this sort of thing.
Sometime after that, some people in the record business put together these long-playing records, which were popular in the day, of Robert.
It was a collection of Robert Kennedy's speeches.
And little geek that I was, I would sit there in my room and listen to them for hours and memorize them.
Okay, flash ahead to September of 1987.
And this whole incident of plagiarizing Neil Kinnock comes forward and the Biden campaign says, oh, well, this was a mistake and he doesn't do this.
I knew this not to be so because I had heard him on a campaign stop in California a few months earlier.
And I thought, well, I'll listen to him.
It was a snowy day in Washington and everybody had gone home.
So I'm sitting there alone in my White House office with the TV on and I'm listening.
And I began to realize that strangely, I'm getting to the end of his sentences before he is.
And I thought, you know, this is just stunning.
He's outright plagiarizing from Bobby Kennedy.
So when this other incident happened and it was said that he didn't do this, I picked up the phone and called Maureen Dowd, then a columnist, then a reporter for the New York Times.
Told her she was astounded and asked if I could document it.
And I said, sure.
And I went home to my parents' house, went into the basement, pulled out the records, brought it back, gave it to the New York Times.
And within two days, they had a story.
It was a front-page story.
And on the inside of it, I was quoted.
So I just thought we would talk.
My point is, how smart is the president?
Because it's just unimaginably not smart to plagiarize, in the first case, the leader of the British Labor Party, who's no private citizen that no one knows.
Of course, they have somebody who had video of it.
And it wasn't smart to plagiarize Robert Kennedy because, of course, Robert Kennedy was one of the most famous people in American history at that point and was well on tape with all of this sort of thing.
So do we have some of the tape on this?
And we thought we'd play it for you.
But this standard is not a measure of how we can evaluate the condition of our society.
It cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of our education, the joy of their play.
Yet the Cross National Product does not allow for the health of our children.
And that is Robert Kennedy.
For the joy of their play.
Let us pledge that our generation of Americans will pay any price, bear any burden, accept any challenge, and meet any hardship to secure the blessings of prosperity and the promise of opportunity for our children.
We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of Lenin.
And I started thinking as I was coming over here: why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
Oh, why am I?
Yes.
That's right.
In a thousand generations to be able to get the university.
Why is it that my wife is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college?
Why is Glennis the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get the university?
No, it's not because they weren't as smart.
It's not because they didn't work as hard.
It's because they didn't have a platform upon which to stand.
Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment?
Of course not.
It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.
Included in that clip, I mean, he actually plagiarized President Kennedy's inaugural address, which in the world of presidents is one of the most famous inaugural addresses ever.
And yet, there he is as if, and what boggles my mind is he's saying this to audiences of Democrats, where you can bet there's a healthy percentage of people in the audience that remember this stuff or know it or they're somehow familiar with it.
So the question I had is, you know, that's just not smart to do.
And now you look around at all the government spending.
You look around at what's happening on the border wall.
You look around at the pullout from Afghanistan.
I mean, on and on and on goes this business.
And you think, wow, we have a serious problem here with a president who's just not, you know, however nice or not nice he might be is just not on the ball here.
And that's a real problem.
I would gently push back on that and just say.
I know you're shocked.
I don't know that it's that he's not that smart.
I will go on the record and say I don't think he's smart.
But I also just don't think he cares because there is no one to stop him.
If you think about the election in 2020, he didn't campaign because he didn't have to.
He was paid for.
They knew that they had all the money in the coffers and they were going to do everything they could to get him in that office.
You know, when he went and he let out Brittany Griner and not Paul Whelan, why?
Because he knew he had the media and he had the administration to back him up and no one was going to stop him.
When he said he didn't want to bust people of color into his neighborhood because he didn't want to turn his neighborhood into a racial jungle, it was because he knew no one would stop him.
When he told a female reporter that she could sit down and take it easy because, you know, there was a time when they weren't even in that room with him.
Nobody said anything to him.
And just like nobody said anything until one person calls it out, such as yourself, to the media, and Maureen doubt to her credit at the time.
Yes.
When the New York Times still considered themselves to be a paper of record that actually did things that mattered, right?
And when that story was published, it created quite a fur.
And shortly thereafter, I mean, other people began noticing things.
And I think Leslie Stahl from CBS had looked into his law school.
Correct.
Had the background, the GPA, how he finished.
I mean, it's just like the story the other day about the Purple Heart and Uncle Frank.
And what are you talking about?
But again, you see it nowhere.
Right.
It's really unconscionable.
And I think, too, to Ethan's point, you know, it's the difference between a media of then, a media of now.
Oh, definitely.
I mean, you can't say anything now.
If I had discovered this in today's world and handed it over to a reporter for the New York Times, it would never see the light of it.
The FBI would have been saying this is Russian disinformation.
It's from Twitter, ban it from Facebook.
That is exactly right.
And, yeah, the media environment is just so totally different, and it's not for the better.
All I can say.
But also, they destroy you.
Yeah.
I mean, look at John Paul Mac Isaac, right?
Yeah.
Guy owns a freaking repair shop, fixing computers and laptops, not bothering anybody, thinks he does the right thing, calls what he believes to be the premier agency of law enforcement.
Right.
And they destroy him.
Right.
Why?
Yeah.
Well, this is what they do.
And, you know, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm sitting here on the Sean Hannity show and realizing that in the course of history, conservatives began to wake up.
And God bless our late friend Rush Limbaugh, who did that show and really began to set things on fire.
And then Sean and then Fox News and now it's Newsmax and the Media Research Center.
And I mean, it's all over the Washington Times, etc.
So on we go here.
This will be a great year.
Lots of challenges.
And I hope you'll be tuning into Sean, who will be here every day once we get started again.
And Merry Christmas to you.
And we will be right back for one more short segment.
Thank you for joining me today.
My name is Jeffrey Lord, and it has been a very real honor to sit in for our friend Sean Hannity today.
Please follow me at RealJeffrey Lord and listen to my podcast wherever podcasts are found.
The word of the Lord and my website, thegerelord.com.
I wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year.
God bless you all, and God bless this nation.
Good night.
And thank you, Jeffrey, for filling on in for us today.
We are so grateful to have you.
You have been a real patriot.
Love doing it.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
I'm Carol Markowitz.
And I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently.
Normally is about real conversations.
Thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic.
We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday.
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